Martin_Silenus

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hace 28 díasdiscuss

Reverse-engineering is fun.

hace 28 díasdiscuss

Nothing surprising here. People who view C++ as just a better C always outnumbered those who view it as another language.

That's exactly how democratic governments make their decisions… you might think it's stupid, and you'd be right, but that's democracy. It's the majority that counts, not what's right. At least you can have a little fun with their arguments, they're pretty inventive you know.

hace 30 díasdiscuss

It's not fundamentaly an anti-AI stance (though I think agentic stuff is the worst usage of LLMs for code, I won't even try to debate about it with people completely sold to it). The issue is what HN is all about now. Brute-forcing is the opposite of hacking spirit in the first place, and I've never read HN to read about that all over the place. Hackers never aimed to deliver things fast, that's not even the point.

hace 2 mesesdiscuss

Girl, give them ELIZA, they won't even notice.

hace 2 mesesdiscuss

Passion for code, dedication to the art of it... is what always defined me since 1980 on my Magnavox Odyssey. So I perfectly understand what he is talking about, and I share most of it. Still, he makes me smile sometimes with condescension on his stubbornness (I know what I'm talking about, I am stubborn).

Well now, he just makes me smile, not laugh. I keep my laughs to those who embrace AI yelling "hooray" that they no longer need to code while they pretended to love it for so many years. No, you didn't. You though you did, as many people think they love their partner. Or childs. But to which point? What would you sacrifice for it? Whatever you say, you don't really know, and you probably have to say it anyway for the sake of looking weird, or a so-called bad person.

I don't care of what people think here, so let's do it: I sacrified my social life to my passions. My professional life too. I turned down promotions, even early. Because not coding, or coding less, was not worth any salary. Besides I'm not made to manage teams anyway, they would blame me for being harsh, too demanding, so no, forget it. I want to remain happy, your employees too. Let me do what I love and everything will be fine (though don't take me for a grunt, I have things to say in my field, this is MY field). Yes, I sacrified my life to it. Did you? No, you're not dedicated enough. That's not a shame, maybe I'm the one to blame, maybe I'm the one pointless, the one too much this or too much that, but I am what I am.

So I won't blame him for this article. We're probably the same kind of nerds in that regard, and nerds are just that: living in another dimension. Not only different from a so-called conformity, but something more unfathomable. That's why they marginaly work together: they can't even understand each other completely.

However, I would not have written that I don't use AI. Because I do use AI, but undoubtly and definitey not the way most people do (or pretend to). And probably in a way the author did not really try. No need for the damn Claude and such, come on. Free options are enough for that way of using it. Need to refactor? Why would I ask the AI, I prefer to do it with LSP in my Emacs editor. Takes longer? Maybe. But I'm still aware of the whole thing. My brain cells refresh, like a RAM.

AI does not write my code. It often suggests, so often that it's not rare I ask it firmly to stop writting code, only talking about it, about some logic in a specific area. That's a quite different approach. And even if its code is good, I would be ashamed to kill/yank (you though I would copy/paste? Come on!). First, it's not my style, not my naming conventions, etc. I know we can lead it to use our style (users of Claude always talks about config files for such things), but I fucking don't care. I don't want to depend on this, needless to say what I think about paying for it.

I can say it now: AI is the better companion of the lonely nerd EVER. I wish the author would find it at some point. Not to write code for him, but to help when in doubt on something. Oh damn, I always have doubts in many ways. That's sane to doubt. Never leaving the thinking apart, no way! My brain cells need that.

Also to have clues of the options. Clues of the newer paradigms. Or simply chit-chat about... code. Common practices. Algorithms (more often, it just responds about things I already know, so what? It's not in my mind, let's continue). For example, it's very good to embrace modern C++, there are so many things that changed in that field. It's also good to make sense of sometimes over-verbose compiler errors, especially when you go crazy with your own templates (omg, yes, in that damn context it's a typename, such things). Or to work with unreadable regexps too. Such things again.

That's not an approach for work, for jobs, to make a life. Where we have dead-lines and must respect it as much as we can. I don't work since a year or two, I'm just keeping an eye on technology, as I always did anyway. I always work much more with my own projects, it's too satisfying to stop, or find an excuse to stop; no boredom. The best times are when I do things for myself, for my own dedication. In that context, without dead-line, the use of AI is sooo different from what they're all mumbling about. TBH, I've read many things about it, and NOT A SINGLE time I've read something that closely matches how I use it.

I don't buy time with AI. Most people do, but I definitely don't. On the contrary, I lose time... but for the better. The same way I always lost time digressing of my current goal. What's that new thing it talks about? Wait a minute... wtf? Let's dig it... wow, that's cool! One hour lost, still... not really lost. And again, and free, no charge, not for that. Yes, I need to recall some context sometimes, just enough for what a fresh session needs to know. It does not need to know all my codebase, just that bit, and maybe that bit too, and off we go.

So yes, you see, I have much more fun reading them all than reading that article which, in many ways, makes sense (and that's a breeze in the AI hype), but which is still too stubborn, and believe me, I rarely say that from other people in my loved field ;)

AI helps me learn. Not to code, I do this since ~45 years! No, learn new things, new paradigm, or old ones I may have missed, because coding field is so large you can't know everything. You just have to insist when it seems to just say what you already know. There's always something to learn at some point. One doesn't have to trust it all the way, we have tabs! Dig the docs, the manuals, the APIs... just like before, except the AI often prevents searching for too long for the good terms.

I could write more on it, a lot more, but I'm not writting an article, so let's stop now.

hace 2 mesesdiscuss

The Internet I grew up on was not the web. It was mail, newsgroups, IRC… maybe the article talks about that, but I don’t care as this is nothing the web can kill in any way.

hace 5 mesesdiscuss

Well, we're talking about something that makes all other mail readers draw J for smileys since decades because M$ doesn't give a shit about even de-facto standards, after all...

hace 5 mesesdiscuss

Maybe God was so angry seeing His fellows embrassing LLMs. So He asked vaguely one of those lame things, for the first time:

  0. "Make something cool out of this insane amount of energy." (temp: 10^42 Kelvin)
  1. He slept for a while.
  2. Datacenter exploded His realm.
  3. ~380 000 years passed and fiat lux.
  4. ~13 billions years passed and here we are.
  5. JMP 0.

hace 5 mesesdiscuss

I wonder what the hell is that damn thing I select sometimes on my Vulkan engine with --gpu-select=Intel :)

hace 8 mesesdiscuss

Asimov describes networks of moving walkways on Earth. There are several adjacent ones with different speeds, and the central one is the fastest. People optimize their journeys by entering the network from the outside and gradually moving to the faster inner beltway. And vice versa when they approach their destination. It's very detailed, quite realistic… and inspiring.

hace 9 mesesdiscuss

Did this on my Atari ST 68000 back in the 90s... I did not even heard about the word "preemptive" at the time (guys, I did not even know the Amiga OS did this natively), it was just an idea. Task switching every 10 or 20 HBL or so. I was so glad to have two routines running, each one changing color index 0 register to red and blue so I can see it realtime.

hace 9 mesesdiscuss

> I'm skeptical the majority of tech experts are struggling to find the utility of them.

Looks like we did not read the same article.

hace 9 mesesdiscuss

No wonder they did everything they could to hide RSS from the masses: it's such a shame that users control their own feeds rather than their obscure algorithms.

hace 9 mesesdiscuss

I know for sure that HN stands for Hacker News.

hace 10 mesesdiscuss

Sorry, but I did not find any "Aaaaaarrrrrrrggggghhhhhhh" to purchase. Could you give me more details?

hace 10 mesesdiscuss

Forget it, you won't be able to be funnier than the 1991 TRUE PATH TO NIRVANA. This is unbeatable.

hace 10 mesesdiscuss

People's stupidity will always surprise me. I mean... it's such a basic irony trick given the subject matter that it doesn't even deserve to be mentioned, let alone questioned.

hace 10 mesesdiscuss

Above all, we mustn't torment the sacrosanct biological neuron center too much (they already have a hard time accepting that they're monkeys, so give them a little dignity, damn it).

“A man doesn't think. It's just probabilistic generation.”

Heretic!

hace 10 mesesdiscuss

That's exactly why I'm here today, after 40 years of passion, penniless, or with very little money, not rich. Disenchanted by the professional aspect of what was initially just a simple obsession with “how it works,” right down to my gut. Then a passion for machine code. Then a megalomaniacal delusion of creating, of bringing ideas to fruition. Not necessarily very elaborate ones. Simple stuff, and sometimes a little less so. Reinventing the wheel, often without even knowing it.

Like my algorithm for drawing lines as fast as possible in 68000 on my ST. Then a few years later, I learned that someone else had invented it almost 30 years before me, and I was able to put a name to my algorithm: Bresenham. Dammit! The Amiga had it natively too. Dammit again!

Again, I invented preemptive multitasking on my 68000. Interrupt, little beast. Vector branch to my task switcher, thanks... save registers, including SP... restore registers from another previously interrupted routine, including SP... write the PC to switch and off we go. A fucking idea, a simple idea. That was cool to see it work, to see the 0 index color changed by each task every 10 scanlines or so. Made me smile. And then a few years later, I learned the word preemptive, and the concept of multitasking that goes with it. And I learned that the Amiga OS (that bastard rival again!) already did it natively. And other machines long before it. DAM-DAM-DAMMIT! I was born too late!

And my email reader on PC, running DOS, in 1991 or 1992, I can't quite remember. It was my first relatively big project in C, because for more than 10 years before that, I swore only by assembler, and I wasn't about to do that in x86, yuck. I didn't know curses or ncurses, but I still made a small TUI with windows and buttons. I was the only one using it for months, for email, mailing lists, newsgroups maybe too, I don't remember... Then one day, a conscientious sysop sent me an email asking me the name of the email reader I was using, because the machine he was administering had flagged a header that wasn't quite right, and he wanted to let the author know :-) My first bug report... under those circumstances, it's not something you forget. “Thanks for the feedback, buddy, but it doesn't have a name, I'm the author, and I'll fix that crap!”

I'm sure you have some fond memories like that too.

These are just examples. There have been others. Maybe even things that no one has ever done before, but that doesn't matter. Because it's still fun, whether we're reinventing the wheel or not. Especially when we don't know anything. It's rewarding when it works. Lots of little moments of pride that we keep to ourselves. Pride in having invented something without anyone's help, when all we had were “XXX Bible” to glean technical informations from, or BBS.

So don't listen to them. They have nothing interesting to say. They never loved programming, they always pretended. And today they tell you that finally, we no longer need to code, that we are finally relieved of this thankless task, that we can finally focus on what really matters.

Bullshit. Either die with your mouth open or let me die in peace! What matters is what we love. The rest is just survival. So if I have to die from my obsession, so be it.

By all means, OP, don't implore them. They've choosen their path, and we've choosen ours. Whatever you say about that won't change anything.

I did not share anything. Am I selfish? Not sure. I did not think it could be fun to others, or worth it. Especially when you consider stuff that already existed since ages, and undoubtedly much more elaborate. “All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain” :-)

hace 10 mesesdiscuss

> Their right handed writing was an artifact of that culture.

Sure. But that does not define a person as a right-handed writer. That's precisely why I wrote "individual's ABILITY to write with their right hand".